+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Last week we heard that wonderful account from the Book of Nehemiah in which Ezra the Scribe reintroduced the Law to the Jewish people outside the Water Gate of Jerusalem. As a reminder, the Jews had been permitted to return to their homeland after the Persians under Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonian Empire, under whose rule the Jews had lived in exile for around seventy years. With the help of the Persians, they rebuilt the Temple and the city walls and resumed their common cultural and religious life, with the major exception that they had been muddling through without the benefit of knowing or having easy access to the Law of Moses for over eighty years. So Ezra read the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, to them and interpreted it for them and then sent them on their way telling that instead of immediately mourning their generations-long disobedience they should first rejoice and celebrate that the Law had come back to them.
What I failed to mention was that there was yet one more critically important element of the Jewish religious heritage which Ezra was incapable of bringing back to the people. The temple had been rebuilt and its system of sacrificial worship restored. The edicts of God had been rediscovered and renewed. But(!), the Ark of the Covenant and the stone tablets of the commandments which it contained remained lost. Indeed it remains lost to this day.
The mystery of its whereabouts came up in our adult Sunday school a month or two ago when we were considering the Books of the Maccabees. In the second chapter of Second Maccabees we learn that the Prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark somewhere on the mountain where Moses had first received the Law. Some of his followers attempted to mark a path (a sort of treasure map) so they could find it again when the exile was over, but the prophet rebuked them, explaining that its hiding place should remain a secret to future generations, but that it would be found again when “God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy.” One would think that he had meant by this the year 538 B.C., when the Babylonian Exile had ended, but this was apparently not the case.
So where is it? I explained to the class that it was not actually recovered by Indiana Jones, rescuing it from the Nazis who wanted to use it as a weapon of mass destruction, before placing it in a warehouse under the vigilant eyes of “top men.” The likeliest candidate for its actual location (though it’s hard to say, because so many of the theories have an element of strangeness and conspiracism) is Axum, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to have it under lock-and-key, but they won’t let anybody but monks and senior prelates see it, so who knows?!
Now, what if I told you the Ark had been found? You’d think I was crazy, that I had delusions of being the real-life Indiana Jones! Well, I can’t make a claim for the literal, historical artifact, but when we read scripture typologically, understanding that the Old and New Testaments make once hidden meaning clear, that prophecy is fulfilled in unexpected ways, then in a real sense we can say that the Ark has been found, and this is what we are celebrating on this great feast day.
Now, before I explain what I mean, a disclaimer is in order. It used to be that one of the worst things you could be called in certain circles of progressive Christianity was a “supercessionist”, which in those circles is a theologically loaded way of accusing somebody of being an anti-semite. I’m not sure that this is still the case, since so many on the extreme end of those circles have moved from expressing absolutely legitimate concerns about human rights in Gaza and elsewhere into honest-to-God anti-semitism themselves, under the euphemism “Christian Anit-Zionism.” This is all complicated and sensitive, but suffice it to say that you can lament and even denounce violations of proportionality under just war principles without saying nonsense like “Hamas are good guys, actually.” It seems to me a lot of presumably well-meaning people on all sides have lost the plot, as they say.
Anyway, the charge of “supercessionism” by those who use the term, is that it is inherently anti-semitic to claim that the New Covenant has fulfilled the Old. Well, the problem with saying supercessionism is bad, then, seems to mean that we’re not actually supposed believe what the New Testament says. There’s a lot of rhetorical mumbo-jumbo to try to claim that it means something else, a lot of hermeneutic hand-waving, but in my opinion that’s essentially the crux of the matter. So, I could be perhaps legitimately accused of supercessionism, and like I said, at least at one point in very recent history that would mean there are plenty of cocktail parties I’d not get an invitation to at the American Academy of Religion annual conference, if I ever went to it, but I can live with that.
Lastly on this matter, before finally returning to the point, I’d say that you’ve got to hold this truth together with the fact that God doesn’t go back on his promises, and so he’s absolutely not sending faithful, observant Jews to hell or anything like that! They are God’s people AND God has extended that definition to include Christ’s Church in which, through Jesus, we have all been made citizens with the saints. If you want fancy theological terms to explain this, punitive supercessionism is illegitimate but economic supercessionism seems inescapable in a genuinely Christian systematic theology, at least in my opinion.
And here’s the point I’ve been creeping up on with the preceding disclaimer–the location of the physical, historical Ark of the Covenant is ultimately irrelevant, because this day, the Ark of the New Covenant and even more importantly, the New Covenant itself made manifest, return to the temple. The ark is Our Lady, who bore the Word in her spotless womb. The Covenant itself is manifest not in tablets of stone, but in flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ.
There were two rites being fulfilled in the Jerusalem temple that day more than two millennia ago. One of them used to be the title of this feast day–the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The belief, understandably de-emphasized by the holiday’s name change because it seems so backwards by contemporary standards, that a woman was ritually unclean after giving birth was actually, probably the primary reason for the Holy Family’s visit to the temple. You hear me complain enough about certain updates to our liturgical practices in the latter half of the last century, but one change for which I’m extremely grateful is that the old service of “The Churching of Women” which seemed to assume something like this belief (and, lets face it, the inability of a lot of men to see women’s bodies as either objects to be possessed or mysterious, icky things to be covered up either ritually or literally) has happily been replaced by a service of thanksgiving for the birth or adoption of a child. In all events, if there were ever a woman who didn’t need a ritual purification after giving birth, it was Our Lady, and yet faithful to the law under which she was still living, she dutifully presented herself at the temple.
The second rite, which we focus more on these days, is the presentation of the Christ Child. This is actually another requirement of the Law, but there’s a twist here. The redemption of the firstborn was a sign of the deaths of the first-born sons of Egypt and the redemption of the first-born of the Israelites at the Passover. To redeem the Israelites that were spared an offering to the Temple was expected, either a lamb and a pigeon or turtledove or, for the poor (as was the case for the Holy Family), no lamb and two birds. There are apparently conflicting traditions here, as in Exodus and even elsewhere in Leviticus (from which the reference in the Gospel comes) the price of redemption was not sacrificial animals but money, specifically five shekels. In any event, some offering was to be made. What is not expected in the Law, though, is that the first-born son himself be presented, just the offering. It would have been more likely, were he an ordinary first-born son, that Jesus would have been left with his Aunt Elizabeth or some other relative while Mary and Joseph went to the temple to fulfill their obligations. So the child’s presence in the temple is significant. Six hundred years after Jeremiah hid the Ark and the tablets, they have both returned in an unexpected and glorious manner.
So is the fact that it was not the priests but an elderly man and an elderly woman known for their devotion who understand who the child is. The temple elite, no doubt, would have preferred the armies of Israel to rise up and return with the Ark of the Covenant to presage the successful Jewish revolt against the Romans that was in fact never to come. The wisdom of Simeon and of Anna was to see that the Ark was before them, the Law had become flesh, the whole world had changed because God had chosen to save his people by means the powerful had not anticipated, but which had been anticipated by the prophets of old.
And the Fathers also bear witness to the return of the Ark and of the Word of God in the reopening of the temple to the nations, albeit not the temple made with hands, a copy of the true one. St. Jerome remarks in a rather earthy section in his tract against the Pelagians, which considering the hour and the company I’ll put delicately rather than quoting directly, that the east door of the temple through which only the high priest may pass on his way to the Ark and which had been closed for century upon century was indeed opened in the moment of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.
An image which I love most of all pertaining to this day, and with which I’ll conclude is given by St. Ephrem the Syrian, who explains the Prophetess Anna’s prediction that a sword should pierce the Blessed Virgin’s soul. Yes, it is the sword of grief which she felt standing at the foot of the cross. But it is also the flaming sword with which the cherubim guard the tree of life in Eden. Whereas Eve’s trespass closed the door to Paradise, the new Eve, Mary the Mother of God, has disarmed the sentries and opened the way once more. As Adam fled with his spouse, the New Adam, Christ Jesus, has first stormed the gates of Hell and then opened the way back to Paradise, where with his Mother he awaits his Spouse, the Holy Church of God, to welcome her, to welcome us, back to the Temple not made with hands, heaven itself, where he will reign over us for all eternity. To him be the glory to the ages of ages. Amen.